Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

“But the thing is,” he continued, “you asked what you should do and I said you needed legal advice, and soon. What else is left to say? The only law I’m conversant with has to do with dead bodies, rights to remain silent. Things like that. If you’d done away with Renata, I’d be of use. Otherwise…” He glanced at his watch.

  Was he implying that having said everything about the topic, we could move on? What about carrying on? Actual, bona fide lamentations? I suddenly missed my little house shared with only the cat, who’d willingly endured—or ignored—as much obsessive self-pity as I provided. Time-sharing a life with a human had a real downside.

  Even the feline soul mate was a turncoat. He half dozed, eyes open, near Mackenzie’s favorite chair, looking bored with me, too.

  Tough. I wasn’t through. “Then there’s her guilt-ridden accomplice, Sally,” I said. Who needed to hear what had happened on his job, anyway, given that the answer would, always, be murder had happened. Again. “She’s the complete opposite, demanding punishment, over-atoning…”

  “Uh-huh,” Mackenzie said. “You hungry?”

  “Boneless chicken breasts on the counter.”

  He retrieved the plate. “What happened to them? Looks like roadkill.”

  “I tenderized them.”

  “Tough breasts? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  “Pounded breasts. Very California cuisine. After saying ‘have a nice day’ that’s how they sublimate their pent-up aggression.”

  “It didn’t do the trick for you, though,” he said mildly. “Mind if I take over in here?”

  I had enjoyed bludgeoning the meat, but I had no energy left, and was more than willing to pass the torch.

  He busied himself in the kitchen, or in that section of the loft so designated since there really wasn’t a room in which to go. We had a paucity of doors to slam and not much place to hide. I missed my house again.

  “Turn on the news, would you?” he called out.

  “Why? You already know the big stories.” He had a perverse need to listen to the media’s distortions of the crimes he knew firsthand.

  “You don’t,” he answered, “an’ you might want to.” I turned the TV on.

  The screen filled with two perkies whose expressions suggested that they never once heard the headlines they read off the monitor. Just once, I’d like to see revulsion, horror, or miserable unhappiness mar their happy-news faces. Maybe if I told them about my lawsuit?

  That wasn’t a half-bad idea. It wouldn’t touch their plastic hearts, but it could put the suit under the glare of scrutiny. If everybody knew what the Fields were doing, maybe they’d be too ashamed to do it. I had to find out how a non-celebrity, an ordinary teacher turned her woes into sound bites.

  “Our lead story tonight answers, at least partially, a local mystery that has troubled the city through the holiday season.” You could tell this was serious, not cute or human-interesty, because the male anchor had been assigned the telling of it. Sexist, but true. “For more than two weeks, a search has been on for Theodore Serfi—”

  “They found him?”

  “—who disappeared in late December after attending a meeting of his Mummers’ club. There have been many theories and some allegations since then, but not until today has there been an answer.”

  “A real answer?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I tried.” Mackenzie sounded weary. “But th’ only news our wire service picked up was that you were bein’ sued.”

  He was a tolerant man. I’d have to remember that.

  The screen showed a large brick building, not unlike ours, but not like it, either. The on-screen place did not have near neighbors or trendy galleries at street level. It stood alone, in the middle of a deserted parking lot. Windows were missing, and on its side, ers was visible in outline, as if large metal letters had been ripped off the bricks. A reporter—female, this time—held a mike and tried not to shiver as she smiled at the camera. “We’re here at the former home of Stanley Brothers.”

  Mackenzie hissed. A lot of the city responded that way to the name of the brothers whose candy plant—licorice was their specialty—had defined their neighborhood as its home for generations. Fathers, sons, and grandsons had filled spots on their production lines until the past March, when Stanley Brothers gave its one thousand two hundred employees seven days’ notice. This plant, they said, had become “unnecessary.” So had its workers. Licorice could be produced more cheaply elsewhere on the globe. And so died a lot of jobs and another chunk of city, and there weren’t a whole lot of other licorice makers waiting to absorb the displaced.

  Since March, the building had been attacked in lieu of its departed management. Those broken windows that had been boarded up had spiderwebs of graffiti on them. The bricks were spray painted as well, as was a pathetic for rent sign that mentioned the square feet available. And all around the building, even as the camera panned, shards of glass and blooms of trash. It looked like what it was, the site of a catastrophe.

  The reporter took it all in stride, stepping lightly through the ruins. That’s how she kept from being as unemployed as the erstwhile candy makers. “Late last night, acting on an anonymous tip, police combed this empty factory, and in a storage room still filled with cellophane bags in which licorice was once packed, they found the frozen body of Theodore Serfi. Preliminary reports indicate the presence of multiple gunshot wounds, although police have not yet determined the time or precise cause of death.”

  The ghoulish camera switched to the grieving father, and an offscreen voice asked how he felt. What did they expect him to say? Why did they ask such things?

  “I’m glad they finally found him. I knew he didn’t run away or just leave before Christmas and the parade, the way people said. My son wouldn’t do that.” He cleared his throat. “And now,” he continued, “let him rest in peace. And I hope the police find whoever did this horrible thing.” Then he waved them off.

  The family, the reporter went on to say, has always denied any criminal connections and has no theory as to why this happened or who might have done it.

  Speaking of which, the camera was now on none other than Arthur King, standing in front of his meat-packing house, as elegant a sausage maven as ever. “If you’ve driven around the city lately,” the reporter said, “you may have seen somebody’s idea of a joke, the defaced ads for King’s Sausage and the inferences that they, or members of that family, had something to do with the disappearance of Teddy Serfi.”

  Arthur nodded. He wore a navy blue topcoat and a silvery white fringed scarf that looked color-coordinated with his hair. He wasn’t carrying a book. Maybe he’d extracted everything he could from Machiavelli.

  “You must be relieved by today’s discovery,” the reporter simpered.

  How had they known to go to him? How had he known how to turn his private botherations into news? Would he tell me if I asked?

  “We have mushrooms?” Mackenzie called over.

  “Dried ones.” Even without mushrooms, he’d created a mouth-watering ambience. Life was good as long as garlic perfumed the air.

  “Everyone in any way connected with King’s Sausage is relieved,” Arthur said. “And exonerated. Maybe this will prevent others in the future from leaping to unsubstantiated conclusions and hurting innocent parties. Our long and honorable reputation has been grievously injured by the deliberate and organized slanderous campaign of people who may have been understandably upset, but who chose a bad way to express their worry and grief.”

  Enough already about the besmirched honor of sausage.

  “For thirty years, we have stood for cleanliness and purity of product, and so it remains. All of us at King’s Sausage hope this sordid affair and all the unjustified allegations are now a thing of the past, and that the long and honorable tradition of our company will be restored.”

  I’d known he was literate, but not what a smooth spokesperson he could be, gobbling up airwaves, giving his company enviable fre
e advertising.

  “Well, well,” Mackenzie said. “Rumors that your competitor’s bodily fluids are in your product must really hurt business.”

  Yes, but. Something about his performance bothered me, a something I knew—but couldn’t reach, couldn’t see clearly. It nagged like the early stages of a toothache, not altogether there, but uncomfortable and guaranteed to get worse.

  “And now,” the female anchor said, “turning to another neighborhood in shock after a bizarre explosion…”

  How small a sound bite a murder generates these days—an ordinary, non-celebrity, gunshot murder. Standard-issue ghoulishness. Sorry, Serfi.

  Might as well focus on my own life. Least I could do, given my man’s good work, was set the table. I stood up and looked industrious, putting out cobalt place-mats, blue-and-white napkins, and blue-rimmed white plates. They contrasted with the pale oak surface for a pretty, faux-French country table.

  I’d have remembered flowers, too, if it weren’t for that damned lawsuit. Blue somethings, yellow-and-white daisies in a water jug. Blue candles. Our life as a pretty picture.

  Choosing linens and pottery is kind of like grown-up finger-painting.

  “Any interestin’ mail or messages?” Mackenzie asked. He was like me in that—optimistic every new dawn about the day’s postal and telephonic possibilities, disappointed every night with what actually arrived.

  I liked that ridiculous hopefulness. I even thought we should get a fax and go on-line with E-mail so as to double the possibilities of something interesting coming our way. And, I suppose, the disappointments.

  “Only the message that I’m being sued,” I said. “Have I mentioned that?” But this time I smiled at his groaned response and then I realized I hadn’t checked the machine. That damned lawsuit had blocked everything out of my mind. “At least I don’t think so.” I checked. Two messages.

  “No,” I said more positively when I heard the first voice. “Nothing important.”

  “You’ll never believe this,” my mother was saying. “Sid, you know? Dr. Landau’s cat that was being taken care of by Violet who’s nice, but flaky is the word. Did I tell you he got sick? Really sick. Of course, he’s incredibly old…”

  I tuned her out and wandered over to where Mackenzie was fluffing couscous and spooning onions and mushrooms over the chicken breasts. He’d even found still-living lettuce leaves and had made a salad with canned beets and a few orange slivers. “We should open a restaurant,” I said. “Get away from teenagers and crime.”

  “We?” he asked mildly. “What part of the partnership appeals to you? Beating up chicken breasts?”

  Actually, I saw myself picking pottery—maybe each table would have a different color scheme, different patterns. Then hostessing, smiling and leading people to tables. Interrupting their conversations to ask if everything was fine.

  “…dead” my mother’s voice announced with great emphasis. “Too quickly for poor Allen Beth to see him at the end.”

  “Somebody died?” I asked.

  “The cat,” Mackenzie said calmly. “Aren’t you paying attention? Old Sid. Ancient Sid. Remember earlier installments?”

  “A guy’s middle name is Beth?” I asked with some excitement. We actually were approaching equality, then.

  “Well,” my mother said, “here’s the thing. First, I think it would be nice if you wrote a sympathy note. I talk about you so much it’s almost like you knew each other, and I don’t think people are kind enough about the loss of pets. That’s Allen with a y—Allyn Beth Laundau, M.D., okay? Same address, apartment eight hundred six. She’d appreciate it. Me, too.”

  Allyn-with-a-y. She. Had her parents really, really, wanted a son, too? Now that I thought of it, was the late lamented cat a Sid, or perhaps a Cyd?

  Was C.K., perhaps, a Cyd? Or something on that order? Was that his big secret? “Cyd,” I whispered.

  No response.

  “Cynthia? Caroline? Charlotte?”

  Nothing, except a puzzled look on Mackenzie and my mother’s voice resolutely continuing with her saga.

  “But,” my mother went on, “the thing is, Violet won’t give up his ashes. She says she was there for him in his last agony, and, well, she insists. Allyn Beth is heartbroken. She pleaded and pleaded, then she offered to split the ashes, divvy Sid up, half for her, half for Violet, but Violet said that was sacrilegious. Allyn Beth is so upset, she’s flying back from her children’s a week sooner than planned to fight for her rights. And you know what I say?”

  I, for one, listened with interest for what truth she had extracted from all this.

  “You have to be crazy to leave Florida in December.”

  Silence reigned in our speechless household until the next voice on the machine. At first, it was only vaguely familiar. “So look,” it said. “Guess by now you know the news, being as it’s on TV.”

  “Emily!” So she’d picked my phone number up off the store floor. It felt like a minor victory.

  “So obviously,” she continued, “there’s no reason for you to keep after the story like you said you were going to because now there isn’t any story left to sell, so if you meant like you said, that you were going to find out about an advance or a spec or whatever you called it, don’t.” She clicked off.

  Mackenzie put a mound of couscous on a serving plate, plus the bedecked chicken breasts. His patience was commendable, except for the series of questioning looks he shot me.

  I tried to piece it together, to answer his questions and mine in between delicious morsels and the compliments they generated. “You are a grand and instinctive cook,” I said.

  “Many thanks.” And he waited.

  “I was sure her story was about the parade, about Jimmy Pat,” I said. “My mistake.”

  “She knew the whereabouts of Serfi’s body,” he said. “Odd.”

  And then I knew what had been nagging at me. I remembered her excitement as she shooed me out of the store yesterday. Her chuckle. The better idea I’d given her by talking about King Arthur, who wouldn’t have had to search for an advance. Emily hadn’t given him her story, she’d sold it to him because that’s what he wanted all along—his sausage cleared of suspicion—and then he had notified the police. I explained it to Mackenzie.

  “Guess that moves him far down on the list of suspects.” I was disappointed.

  “The gun, though. Why’d he want to see it?” Mackenzie shook his head. “You think she knew him personally?”

  “Emily and the dead guy?” I shrugged. “Everybody knows everybody else in that neighborhood, and surely in the clubs. Everybody’s connected to one another. And Emily’s a Mummer groupie, living near Two Street the way she does. It’s not only the extra parade they have there on New Year’s, it’s where most all their clubhouses are. She probably knows them all.”

  “That place they found him—that isn’t close to Two Street. Doesn’t seem she could accidentally stumble over him. Nobody did for more than two weeks, and it’s not my idea of a love nest, surely not in December,” Mackenzie said. “How’d she know?”

  “Given her father, her home life, her standards of love nests might be…” But even I couldn’t buy that rubble as her dream assignation spot. The woman read books with naked-chested pirates on the cover. That wouldn’t fire the imagination for a bed of broken glass. So how had Emily known where Serfi’s body lay?

  “I think she saw it go down,” Mackenzie said.

  “Arthur didn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “First of all—didn’t you say it was a professional job? That he was Hoffa’d?”

  “That was before they found him.”

  “But Arthur still doesn’t make sense. He wanted to end the rumors, clear his company’s name. He wanted to see the gun because if it were identifiable to him, if he could alert the cops to look elsewhere, it would be a way of clearing his name.”

  “Aren’t you making a wide leap? How’d he know the gun had anything to do w
ith Serfi’s death? How’d he even know Serfi was dead?”

  I was stymied, then I remembered. “He assumed it. Always talked about two murders, two dead Mummers, because Ted Serfi wouldn’t have disappeared before the parade, he said. He connected the deaths, thought the same person had done them. And he didn’t do it—or why else would he call the police?”

  “Which you don’t actually know. Maybe Emily did.”

  “When’d you find out?”

  “This morning. They got the call last night. Been working on it ever since.” He poured the last of the wine. “But it isn’t my case, and wasn’t. He was a missing person until last night.” He tapped his fingers. “I did find out today that Arthur with the crown was for real. But obviously, you found that out for yourself.”

  “Arthur King. Emily called him Cam, short for Camelot.”

  “And this Emily, she was eager to get to him last night?’

  “Seemed that way.”

  “Any reason—anything she said—to make you think maybe she owned a gun?”

  “Emily? We didn’t talk about things like…” I put down my wine glass. “This isn’t idle table talk, is it? You’re interrogating me. Why? You’re making me feel like I’m on a witness stand, as if you suspect me of keeping something from you. Why?”

  “I don’t suspect you of a thing, except maybe knowing things that could be useful to keep other people from being suspicious about you. I’m trying to protect you.”

  “From what?” I couldn’t believe this. Suspected? Of what on earth?

  “Serfi was shot three times. Two of the bullets went through him, wherever it was he was killed. They’re gone. No sign that it went down in that cellophane storage room. The third bullet lodged in his pelvic bone.”

  “Yes?” His way of savoring each step along the way of a story made me want to wave a baton, speed his tempo. I’d nod, faster and faster, hoping to subliminally hustle him to the point, but it never worked. “Sounds painful. Awful, but—?”

  “That bullet looks like maybe it came from—”

  I got it. “No. Too weird. It couldn’t—”

  “Probably could,” he answered. “The derringer. A derringer.”